Colombian official slain after pursuit by gunmen

PHIL STEWART, Reuters News Service

Published 5:30 am, Friday, September 7, 2001

BOGOTÁ, Colombia -- Unidentified gunmen killed a leader of a congressional peace commission, shooting him at point-blank range in his garage after chasing him through the nation's capital, police said Thursday.

Jairo Rojas, 37, who set up the first meeting between President Andres Pastrana and the leader of Colombia's largest guerrilla force, the FARC, in 1998, was killed just two hours after sending his police bodyguards home Wednesday evening.

According to police, Rojas was driving home alone from downtown Bogotá when two gunmen began following him. Rojas raced to his apartment building and, panicking, rammed his sport utility vehicle through locked garage doors.

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The gunmen followed Rojas into the building's parking lot and shot him seven times, with a final bullet to the head fired execution-style.

"From the information I have, it appears that he realized they (the gunmen) were following him. He drove through the (closed) gates of (his garage) with his vehicle and they killed him," said Bogotá police chief Gen. Jorge Linares.

An assistant to Rojas, a member of Pastrana's Conservative Party, said the lawmaker had received multiple death threats.

"He had been the object of threats, as a matter of fact authorities had conducted a review of his security," said Rojas' assistant, Alberto Almonacid.

Public officials are often the targets of violence in Colombia, and police said there were no shortage of suspects in Rojas' death -- from criminal gangs to ultra-right militias and rebels fighting in Colombia's 37-year-old war.

Family and fellow lawmakers held a wake in Congress late Thursday, with dozens huddling around Rojas' coffin.

Turbay, his mother, a friend, and four police officers and bodyguards were killed as they were traveling in Colombia's southern jungle, near a demilitarized enclave granted to the FARC in 1999 as a concession to lure rebels to the negotiating table.

It was not immediately known what effect Rojas' death would have on the flagging peace process, which is already at one of its lowest moments in years. Turbay's assassination sparked widespread controversy over the FARC's Switzerland-sized enclave, which the military is barred from entering.

Pastrana extended the rebel enclave just one month after Turbay's slaying, and he seems poised to do the same when his agreement with the FARC expires again Oct. 7. The president said this week that the enclave was needed to prevent an escalation in Colombia's guerrilla war, which has claimed 40,000 lives in the past decade.

Pastrana told foreign correspondents Thursday that Rojas' killing "should be condemned from every point of view."

"Jairo Rojas was always committed to peace and for this reason we're working (on trying to clear up the crime). I have been in contact with the police chief since early in the morning," Pastrana said.

Washington and Colombia's military have hardened their line against the Marxist-inspired FARC, and increasingly accused them of using their enclave as a massive prison for kidnap victims and for running a business in cocaine trafficking.

The guerrilla group announced in June they would begin a new kidnapping campaign targeting lawmakers, judges and government ministers to exchange for imprisoned rebels.

Three members of Congress have been kidnapped and are being held hostage, with one allegedly in the hands of the FARC.